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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2009
The enduring success of any roman-à-clef owes to the ghost of the real world lurking, like a palimpsest, behind the storyworld. Barring a few counterfactual twists, Richard Condon's Death of a Politician follows the chequered career of a dead-ringer for Richard Milhous Nixon through the war-scam 1940s, the red scare 1950s, and the freewheeling-dealing 1960s. Square the revisionist drive of Condon's political fiction with the premise of historical veracity, and you may wonder where sober fact ends and fiction begins. How much of Nixon lies in Walter Bodmor Slurrie? How much of Nixon's banker and confidant “Bebe” Rebozo lies in Slurrie's banker and confidant “Kiddo” Cardozo? How much of the Miami mobster Mayer Lansky lies in Cardozo's boss, Miami mobster Abner Danzig? How much of their crass venality and control is the figment of Condon's imagination? Better still, how much is true? In my article I set out to answer all these questions, using Condon's roman-à-clef as a springboard for analysis of salient aspects of the Nixon presidency and of American electoral politics in general.
1 Richard Condon, And Then We Moved to Rossenarra (New York: Dell, 1973), 152.
2 Richard Condon, A Trembling Upon Rome (New York: Pinnacle, 1983). Mordecai Richler, “A Captivating but Distorted Image,” Book Week (Sunday Herald Tribune), 13 Sept. 1964, 4, 19, 4. David Cochran, America Noir: Underground Writers and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2000), 188.
3 Time magazine, “The Sustaining Stream,” 1 Feb. 1963, 82–84. See also http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,829810-7,00.html. Richard Lingemann, “A Thriller of the Condon Class,” New York Times, 21 May 1976, 80. Leo Braudy, “Winter Kills; by Richard Condon,” New York Times Book Review, 26 May 1974, BR5.
4 Herbert Gold, “Pop Goes the Novel,” New York Times Book Review, 12 March 1978, 10, 39, 39.
5 Richard Condon, Death of a Politician (New York: Ballantine, 1978), 161. See also Empire – The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance (DeViller Donegan Enterprizes/Lion Television, 2004).
6 Larry J. Sabato and Glenn R. Simpson, Dirty Little Secrets: The Persistence of Corruption in American Politics (New York: Times Books, 1996), 16. Condon quoted in Herbert Mitgang, “Condon's Prizzis Turn into a Series,” New York Times, 29 Oct. 1986, C24.
7 Nixon's marital indifference and a possibility of homosexuality are a matter of record. His press secretary, James Bassett, reported that Nixon suffered from and sought therapy for sexual impotence. Fawn M. Brodie, Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 331.
8 On McBain's documentary aesthetics see Peter Swirski, “A is for American, B is for Bad, C is for City: Ed McBain and the ABC of Urban Procedurals,” In idem, ed., All Roads Lead to the American City (Hong Kong and London: Hong Kong University Press), 2007.
9 There are well over a hundred instances of Condon using the names of his acquaintances as minor characters.
10 For the dating of the Lansky connection see Anthony Summers with Robbyn Swan, The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (New York: Viking, 2000), 57; indeed, Summers appears to vindicate much of Condon's fiction with a detailed coverage of the underworld dimension in Nixon's career. For defence contract profits see Stuart D. Brandes, Warhogs: A History of War Profits in America (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 275.
11 Summers, 180. Nixon was indeed the strongest and most insistent proponent of a CIA-led Cuban invasion and assassination of Castro. See Steve Schifferes, “Domestic Issues Swing It for Democrats,” BBC News Online, 8 Nov. 2006, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6126176.stm, on the importance of corruption as a swing issue in the Nov. 2006 congressional elections. For the missing billions in Iraq, see Mark Gregory, “The Baghdad Billions,” BBC World Service, 9–10 Nov. 2006. See also http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6129612.stm and http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6132688.stm.
12 See Summers, especially 111–15, 127–28 and 243–45.
13 Facsimile reproduction of Hughes's notebook can be found in Summers, 279. On Hughes's “loan” to the Nixon family see Brodie, 436–37.
14 See Michael Kramer and Sam Roberts's investigative biography of Rockefeller, “I Never Wanted to Be Vice-president of Anything!” An Investigative Biography of Nelson Rockefeller (New York: Basic, 1973).
15 Dewey's acknowledged connection with Lansky comes up in the context of wartime use of the mafia to secure military goals; see Richard Norton Smith, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times (New York: Touchstone, 1982), 570–73.
16 Death of a Politician, 74.
17 Death of a Politician, 73.
18 Sabato and Simpson, Dirty Little Secrets, 149.
19 John F. Keener, Biography and the Postmodern Historical Novel (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 2001), 114.
20 Lt. Jimmy Stewart, on a hiatus from Hollywood, who puzzled how Nixon's “game became tops” in no time at all, was in fact duped by the man who had played and won for months before; see Jonathan Aitken, Nixon, a Life (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1993), 108.
21 Smith, 602; Death of a Politician, 227.
22 Death of a Politician, 111.
23 Ibid., 149.
24 Ibid., 110.
25 Ibid., 115.
26 Ibid., 217.
27 Michael A. Genovese, The Watergate Crisis (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1999), 22. Data on Nixon's house improvements from Brodie, Richard Nixon, 450; on Nixon's financial irregularities from Fred Emery, Watergate: The Corruption of American Politics of and the Fall of Richard Nixon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 109.
28 Information on Nixon's financial “irregularities” is abundant; outside the biographies, the reader may wish to consult Michael Johnston, Political Corruption and Public Policy in America (Monterey: Brooks/Cole Publishing, 1982); Emery; Susan Welch et al., Understanding American Government, 4th edn (Belmont, CA: West/Wadsworth, 1997); and Genovese.
29 Genovese, 23–25. See also Watergate: A Third Burglary (dir. Mike Gold, Discovery Enterprise Group, 1994, film time 24:46–26:15).
30 Death of a Politician, 47.
31 In John Osborne, “White House Watch: The China Caper,” New Republic, 20 March 1976, 7.
32 Death of a Politician, 308.
33 Merle Miller, Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman (New York: Putnam, 1974), 178. Nixon quote in Los Angeles Times, 4 Dec. 1978, section 2:7.
34 Michael Moore and Kathleen Glynn, Adventures in a TV Nation (New York: HarperPerennial, 1998), 206.
35 Books and Writers, “Richard (Thomas) Condon (1915–1996)” (2002), available at http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/condon.htm. Indexed 17 April 2008. O'Neil quote in Welch et al., 254.
36 James Q. Wilson, American Government, 6th edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 166.
37 Monica Bauer, “Best Chance since Watergate: Campaign Finance Reform in the 105th Congress,” In Paul E. Scheele, ed., “We Get What We Vote For – or Do We?”: the Impact of Elections on Governing (Westport, CN: Praeger, 1999), 112–30, 117.
38 George Benson, Political Corruption in America (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1978), 179.
39 Bauer, 117. For Clinton see Arianna Huffington, Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are Undermining America (New York: Crown, 2003), 97; for Bush Senior see Michael Parenti, America Besieged (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998), 19; for Bush Junior see Huffington, 149.
40 Helen Caldicott, The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush's Military–Industrial Complex (New York: New Press, 2004), 33–35.
41 In Leon Harris, Upton Sinclair: American Rebel (New York: Crowell, 1975), 335.